T HE T IME LORD
Ageing is an inevitability, but our passage through the process isn’t, writes Norman Lazarus
“To use cycling to lose weight is to overlay the joys of the road with an unnecessary and unrealistic burden”
Iam delighted to have the opportunity to be able to discuss with fellow cyclists how my age impacts on my cycling. How old am I? Sufficiently old to have children who are going grey. I’ll be celebrating my 85th birthday this November and have been cycling for around three decades, so you can work out that I was a late starter.
Thirty years ago, I was sitting down to dinner with my wife and, glancing down, saw this big bulge over my belt. I have no idea why, in that time and place, I decided enough was enough and vowed to myself never to be overweight again. I’ll discuss in future issues how I tackled this weight problem, but I stress that I took up cycling not to lose weight but to get my muscles and other functions in tip-top shape. For people like me and you, the way to lose weight is to eat less. To use cycling to lose weight is to overlay the joys of being out on the road with an unnecessary and unrealistic burden. Do not contaminate the cycling experience by this baggage.
I’m an average cyclist without any great attributes other than I love riding Audax events and, by sheer persistence, became the UK Audax Veteran Champion in 2001. Alas, as I drift downstream on my ageing physiological raft, Audax fades further and further into the distance. So what? It’s not the end of the world, but the beginning of a smaller, more confined one that’s still chockful of pleasures.
I’m a medical doctor who decided to investigate the effects of cycling on the physiological function of dedicated cyclists. There I was at 70, retired for about 10 years, and cycling for 15, when the thought struck me that it’d be a good idea to find out how cycling was affecting my oldish, creaking body – as any normal, retired person would do…
I’ve been doing research at King’s College London for about 15 years at a professorial level with a group of world-class colleagues dedicated to the topic of healthy human ageing. I try not to ask my cycling volunteers to do any procedure that I haven’t undergone myself. I’ve had biopsies of the vastus lateralis thigh muscle taken, tubes stuck down my nose to measure diaphragmatic function and ridden myself to exhaustion in order to determine VO2 max. At my age, you have to get your fun moments whenever you can grab them.
A perennial question is whether exercise can stop ageing. All I have to do is look in the mirror and see my tortoise-like profile staring back at me to know that the question is based more on wishful thinking than reality. It’s difficult to construct an analogy that accurately reflects the human ageing process. Try to imagine a robot that has a hammer and is programmed to strike a rock twice a minute at always the exact same force. This represents the ageing process. Get a ton of rock made of sandstone and set the robot going. The rock will be smashed pretty quickly. Now get a ton of granite and again set the robot to work. The time to smash the rock will increase. What has changed is the quality of the rock. The robot remains the same.
Think of a sedentary body as being analogous to sandstone. This is easy meat, you might say, for the unchanging ageing process. Then imagine an exercised body, a toned body at its optimum. Much more resistance here. It’s impossible to change the human ageing process, but what we can all do, every one of us whatever our physiological capabilities, is moderate its effects. That is the best we can do.
We – every single person on this planet – are going to grow old. Accept it. But by altering our lifestyle, we can turn the downward trajectory of our lives into a toboggan track rather than a struggling, tumbling, injury-laden passage down the mountain. We’re all going to hit the bottom around about the same time, but what an adrenaline rush for those of us who have chosen the toboggan are going to enjoy.